So John has come to my
point of view. Of course I agree with Pelasgians = Sons of the Soil,
natives in general. I'm not sure that I agree however with your placing them and
the Tyrrhenians in the neolithic. This begs the question - who were the Trojans
of Troy I/II? These, for me, are the Tyrrhenians, speaking the ancestor of
Etruscan. My reasons are twofold :
1. the congruence of the names
all deriving from a root T(u)R(u/o)S;
2. the forms
Tyrrhenos/Tyrsenos.
This last suggests to me that
the Greeks must have been familiar at an early date with the name Tyrsenos for
it to have undergone the Greek development /s > h/. This development predates
Linear B, since the /s>h/ development is complete in Linear B texts. So we're
talking pre-15th century. This means that Tyrrhenos cannot be a classical Greek
resurrection of a pre-EBA name, since by classical times the /s>h/ sound
change was no longer operating, so the name that would have been resurrected
would have been Tyrsenos.
So this all suggests to me that
the Greeks were very early in contact with Tyrsenoi, and sufficiently impressed
with them to use their name often enough for it to undergo the normal phonetic
development of Greek. In other words, it is not a resurrected or
recherche/literary form. Conclusion : the Tyrsenoi/Tyrrhenoi were the people of
the sophisticated technically advanced culture of Troy I/II which was destroyed
c.2250BCE.
I don't think one can associate
Tyre with the Tyrrhenians. The first letter of Tyre is in fact the same as the
first letter of Sidon, the Semitic tsade, mod.Ararabic sad (the emphastic 's'),
which as an affricate 'ts' seems to have led the Greeks to use 't' for Tyre and
's' for Sidon.
As for the Pelasgians, they may
have been neolithic, but that is surely pure speculation.
To answer Rex about the problem
of where the Greek language came from, I meant that it is only a problem if we
assume the Pelasgians to be pre- or non-Greek. You then have to conjecture
under what circumstances they came to be Greek speaking, as they must have been
by the time the invaders/colonisers subsumed under Danaos and Kadmos arrived. To
posit Greeks as an elite group dominating originally neolithic Pelasgians
means we have to imagine the subject people adopting the elite's
language while the elite adopts the subject people's ethnic name. Surely
the most usual course of affairs is that the elite end up speaking the
language of the numerically superior subject people, while the
elite's prestigious ethnic name is perpetuated. So can we envisage
Pelasgians dominating numerically superior Greeks?
To me, this is only possible if
we make the Pelasgians equal Tyrrhenians. This is a possibility, given
that the Greeks seem to have been impressed enough by the Tyrsenoi (above).
The statements that Tyrrhenians and Pelasgians in Herodotos' day spoke different
languages is not a problem, since they could have been speaking dialects of
the same language, but which had grown far apart during the 1500+ years since
the fall of Troy II. There is also the image of "god equalling"
Pelasgos teaching the natives not to eat poisonous plants and to wear sheepskins
in the cold. It seems unlikely that people resident there since neolithic times
would need this kind of advice, but newcomers might.
Of course, all this has to be
set against the background of the very low cultural level of Middle Helladic.
After all, Pelasgos' teaching does not seem to equal that of other gods like
Thoth or Bacchus.
So what does this make the
Pelasgians? Either early neolithic incomers (per John), Tyrrhenians (per earlier
John and myself) or (per myself) the local Greeks encountered and
possibly named so by Danaos and Kadmos. Whichever one choses, they are
not Rex's Pelasgians.
Italy. Just a couple of
points.
1. The Paeligni were an
Oscan-speaking people. The Oscans, as linguistic entity, were an iron age people
who arrived in Italy, probably via the Adriatic sometime in the 1st millennium.
They were not native or neolithic Italian people.
2. Pre-Tyrrhenian Etruscans. No
such thing, Tyrrhenians and Etruscans are the same. Prior to the unification of
Italy under Roman dominance, Italy was normally referred to by the Greeks as
Tyrrhenia. As I said above re the origin of Tyrrhenos, the Tyrrhenian Sea could
only have been named so by Greeks. Their first appearance there, apart from as
interlopers who were chased off by the Tyrrhenians/Etruscans, was mid-8th
century. It is quite possible that the Tyrrhenians/Etruscans had been in Italy
from c.1100BCE, 800 only marks their emergence as a recongnisably distinct
culture, thanks to the enormous influence, amounting to almost saturation, of
the Phoenicians. I have long thought that Virgil's Aeneas represented the
arrival of the Etruscans, but it was politically unacceptable to say so in his
day. Also, the linguistic problem of the derivation of Roma (long 'o') from
Remus (short 'e') can be resolved through Etruscan, making it likely that
Remus was Etruscan and therefore that Rome was founded by the Etruscans. Which
also means that the Etruscans had reached Latium before the first Greek colonies
were established.
Miscellaneous
Points
1. Labyrinth from Minoan
storehouse
You're kidding surely. Do you
think that Herodotos would have used a word meaning a storehouse to describe
what he actually saw for himself. Read his description ref. 2.148.1 to 7 again.
The word must surely be Egyptian. There are a couple of good candidates for the
source of the word there, certainly better than the double-headed axe Labrys,
but even this, by its religious connotation argues against your idea. As does
also Lin.B da-pu-ri-to, which I personally think is doubtful (why da- for r/la-,
and the pu is actually pu2 or phu, so why the aspiration?), and is impossible to
confirm from the context. Anyway, the labyrinth, like mazes and spirals, are
intimately connected with death and re-birth (vegetation, spiritual and thence
initiation into the mysteries) and in Crete is specifically linked to the
Minotaur and the bull cult with its associated double-headed axes, horns or
consecration and the like, all of which date back to the earliest Palatial
period and point to Egypt as the source or inspiration.
2. Pelasgian Dodona and
Pelasgian Zeus.
a) Zeus is one the few Greek
divine names that shows a clear derivation from IE to Greek. In other words,
Zeus is Greek.
b) Dodona, according to
Herodotos and other Greek writers (no refs I'm afraid), was established from the
oracle at Siwa in the Libyan desert. While the oracle was that of Ammon, the
tutelary deity was a certain Ddwn = Dodona?
3. Io and Europa
a) Io has a, to me at least, a
clear Egyptian etymology in 'Ht, "wild cow", and by extension (I assume by
association with the horns) "moon". Io was said to be a dialect word at Argos
for "moon", as it is in Bohairic Coptic (ioh).
b) Europa derives from the
Semitic root /3rb/ (3=ayin) "west, place of sunset", same root as Arab. She was
clearly the daughter or sister of Kadmos (who names means "east" or "old"
Sem.root /qdm/).
To close, I do agree with you
Rex, that there is an underlying unity in the culture and myths of the Aegean
area as a whole, which extends to Italy. However, I see the foundation of that
unity in Egypt, and its early transmission mainly through the Phoenicians, the
great sailors and traders of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.
Cheers for now,
Dennis